Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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The Schmooze Comic Books and Country Music
The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song By Frank M. Young and David Lasky Abrams, 192 pages, $24.95 With a recent issue of Time magazine declaring “The Carter Family” to be one of the seven best comics of 2012, artist David Lasky has ascended to the top tier of Jewish-American comic artists, an august group…
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Life Q&A With Novelist Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg is the author of “Instant Love,” “The Kept Man,” “The Melting Season” and, most recently, “The Middlesteins,” which Interview magazine called “juicy, delicious, dark smorgasbörd of a novel. (It is that and more.) “The Middlesteins” is the story of a Midwestern Jewish family’s relationships, realizations and appetites. Attenberg spoke with The Sisterhood about…
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Life Q&A With Novelist Yona Zeldis McDonough
“A Wedding in Great Neck:” Family Mishegas Arrives Just in Time for the Nuptials Yona Zeldis McDonough’s new novel “A Wedding in Great Neck” takes place over the course of a single day, as a Jewish family gathers for the lavish wedding (to a handsome Israeli) of Angleica, the aptly-named youngest daughter who at least…
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The Schmooze Author Blog: Passing on Stories
Earlier this week, Jami Attenberg wrote about growing up Jewish in a small town. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: My mother was in town for a few days that summer,…
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Culture Paul Goodman Speaks for Half a Generation
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in an Organized Society By Paul Goodman Foreword by Casey Nelson Blake New York Review Books, Classic Series, 312 pages, $17.95 Reading Paul Goodman’s reissued 1960s classic “Growing Up Absurd” may make you nostalgic for a past you never lived. The author’s uncomplicated idealism evokes an earlier decade of…
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Culture Michael Chabon’s Life Is Reflected in ‘Telegraph Avenue’
Even for a particularly verdant block in Berkeley, Calif., Michael Chabon’s home is an oasis amidst the university town clatter and clutter. The brown-shingled house is situated on a flowery patch complete with a wooden fence, a warm front porch and a bouncing Labradoodle named Mabel, who happily charges to the gate to greet visitors….
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Culture Mark Helprin’s Politics Doesn’t Get in Way of Prose
In Sunlight And In Shadow By Mark Helprin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 705 pages, $28 Readers indifferent to Mark Helprin’s strident neoconservatism are often won over by Mark Helprin the literary writer — his energetic prose, his intricate plotting, the dreamlike images in novels such as “Refiner’s Fire,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and “Freddy…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Michael Feinstein on the Gershwins and ‘Porgy’
When Michael Feinstein was in his 20s, he had the good fortune to work as an assistant and archivist for the great Ira Gershwin, who, with his brother George, wrote some of the greatest and most beloved songs in American history. Now a beloved singer in his own right, Feinstein spoke with the Forward about…
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